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Syrian refugee family arrives safe and sound in Mitchell

Members of the Al Mohamad family arrived in Mitchell from Lebanon, through Syria, on March 7 after more than a three-year wait to flee their war-torn country and life in safety in Canada. The family is thrilled to be in their new home in Mitchell, located on Ontario Road. Pictured last week with Louis DeDecker (right), West Perth Syrian Refugee Committee Chair, are Ibrahim (left), 10; mom Shamsa, Yasmin, 9; Karima, 10; Hussein, 7; dad Mohamad holding two-year-old son Hassan, and Abdullatif, 4. ANDY BADER/MITCHELL ADVOCATE

Hassan Al Mohamad celebrated his second birthday in a Lebanese refugee camp with his five siblings and parents, Mohamad and Shamsa, last month.

Last Friday, the wide-eyed dark-haired boy freely ran around the kitchen and living room of his new Mitchell home, shutting doors and taking cautious looks through the glass door at the visitor, a reporter from the newspaper.

He smiled often. This reporter winked and smiled back.

It’s easy to see the joy and relief of the Al Mohamad family, especially Hassan’s father, as they finally made their way out of war-torn Syria, through the “hell” of the four-year refugee stay in Lebanon en route to a brand new country they now call “heaven” – Canada.

Since October of 2015 the West Perth Syrian Refugee Committee, chaired by Louis DeDecker, has been working on receiving a family, raising funds and other essentials and just waiting for the paperwork on their exit visas to be completed. On two different occasions it appeared that a family would be on its way, the final time last September even saw the committee finalize rental of a house in Mitchell, but nothing ever materialized.

Nothing until March 7, that is, when DeDecker and the committee were informed that a family was in Toronto ready to be picked up. A miscommunication – something DeDecker said was the most frustrating part of the entire ordeal – left the local committee scrambling but the Al Mohamad family eventually made their way to Mitchell and stayed for four nights with the DeDeckers until a suitable home was found, cleaned and furnished.

The newest Mitchell family ate dinner in their new Ontario Road home on March 11. The parents will begin taking English lessons as soon as possible and the children, except for Hassan, were enrolled at Upper Thames Elementary School (UTES) this week, looking forward to moving on with their lives.

Mahmoud Alshared, DeDecker’s son-in-law now living in Stratford, acted as translator during a 45-minute interview last Friday and as the kids played at or literally on the kitchen table, Mohamad explained the harrowing ordeal of the past four years as the family waited to come to Canada.

The family lived in the countryside just outside Aleppo, the second largest city in Syria, fleeing the war-torn country to a refugee camp in adjacent Lebanon in 2013, living in tents with an estimated one million other refugees. The exodus from Syria was so extreme that the Lebanese government shut down the border in January 2015, as there were now three million refugees and literally no room for more.

Mohamad, 33, said he and his family – which range in age from 10-year-old twins to the two-year-old, hasn’t felt this secure since their time in Syria before the civil war in 2011 – six long years ago.

“There was suffering every day,” Mohamad said through Alshared, describing they always lived in fear as the Lebanese military would break into their tent at random and search and destroy things for no reason. Civilians in Lebanon treated them like second-class citizens, harassing them or ignoring them.

“They lived in fear all the time. Comparing life in Lebanon to Canada? It feels like hell in Lebanon and heaven in Canada,” he said.

“I wish I could remove the four years we lived in Lebanon,” he continued. “If that was an option I’d like to remove it from our memories altogether.”

In Syria, the only choice was to flee as the military asked you to choose which side of the war you were on – theirs or the rebels - and if you didn’t want to fight, you were considered a terrorist, and if you sided with the rebels, you ran the risk of being arrested or executed.

Life in the refugee camp was so bad in December of 2014, Mohamad explained, that he decided to send his wife and children to his parent’s house in what was believed to still be a safe area in Syria. He put his family on a bus and he decided to stay in Lebanon and collect some money from the United Nations and send it back, but just as the bus got to the border, he received a phone call that his parents’ house had been hit by a shell and no one knew if any of his family was alive or dead. He contacted the bus and asked to bring his family back but they had already crossed the border and when they tried to return, Lebanese officials refused to let them back in. Fortunately, the family found another route and came back into Lebanon illegally.

The Lebanese government was also apparently the main culprits in causing the Mohamad family’s delay in moving the refugees out, holding up their exit visas.

“They just want to make them suffer more,” Alshared said.

DeDecker said he was told that the Canadian government wanted to spread out the refugee families evenly across the country so the local group merely had to sit back and wait for their number to be called.

When the family did arrive, a 12-hour flight with six other refugee families, they did so with just the clothes on their backs, another set of clothes and important documents – just four suitcases for a family of eight.

DeDecker explained that the refugee program is a joint venture where the Canadian government pays 50 per cent of the costs for six months and the local committee pays the rest, noting that there should be enough funds to carry them for one year. After the year is up, the family turns to social assistance if needed but the goal is to get Mohamad and Shamsa fluent in English as soon as possible and then he will try and find work. A truck driver by occupation in Syria, Mohamad also has experience with broiler chickens, having worked in the family business back home.

The children will pick up English quickly, it is hoped, especially at school where they will be helped by another Syrian family already living in Mitchell for more than a year-and-a-half which had their arrival privately funded.

“Mitchell’s been very, very generous,” DeDecker said, adding that if anything, help is still needed to transport the couple to their English as a second language lessons in Stratford.

Mohamad said he and his family were looking forward to coming to Canada but at the same time were worried what to expect once they arrived and what the people would be like.

He needn’t have worried.

“From the moment we arrived at the airport, the treatment we received was shocking and surprising,” Mohamad said. “We felt the warmth of the DeDecker family and the committee members and felt so much love. We weren’t expecting it to this extent. It was beyond what we were expecting.

“Even when we got this house, the committee spent time cleaning it for us,” he continued. “We never experienced this from any other foreign nation. The people of Canada are the greatest people I’ve ever met.”